Week 7: Don’t Turn the Page
The page turn hides the next moment until the reader chooses to look — and that gap can be designed.
Turning the page is normally just how you keep reading — the practical action between one picture and the next. Week 7 asks what that action makes possible: for a moment, the reader knows only what’s on the page in front of them, and nothing about what’s on the other side of it.
- Hide — until the reader turns, the next page is genuinely unavailable. The useful question is what the reader knows before the turn, and what they can’t know yet.
- Delay — a page can make the reader wait before getting an expected result. Delay can build anticipation, uncertainty, tension, or comic timing, but it doesn’t automatically create suspense — its effect depends on what’s being delayed and why.
- Reveal — a turn replaces incomplete information with something newly visible. The important question isn’t just what appears next, but how the new page changes the meaning of the page before it.
- Surprise — a reveal can break an expectation the previous page set up. Surprise on its own isn’t enough — it needs to develop the story, change an interpretation, or create a real effect, not just contrast for its own sake.
- Time — the same physical turn can represent a second passing or hours passing. The reader performs one identical action either way; the relationship the pages are designed to have decides how much story time seems to pass between them.
A simple model holds these together: Before → Turn → After. Before is what the reader currently knows, expects, or predicts. Turn is what’s temporarily withheld by the physical page. After is what becomes visible, and what changes because of it. The strongest page-turn moments aren’t just a good “after” image — they depend on all three parts working together.
The reader is the one who physically performs the turn, so they have some control over pacing — a fact worth noticing here, though Week 9 is where reader action becomes the main subject. For now, the useful test for any page-turn idea is simple: would the effect still work if the reader could see both pages at once? If yes, the turn isn’t doing much narrative work yet.
Today’s studio, Before / After, asks you to design one page-turn pair around a single effect — hide, delay, reveal, surprise, or a shift in time — and check that it depends on the turn rather than just being two pictures in sequence.